Ask anyone here at the eCool compound where to go for a bit of low-brow comedy and a fun-filled expereience and they’ll send you to the aisles of your local Italian grocery store.
The entertainments on offer are vast. You can spar with gladiatoric elderly women for control of the produce scale (in most Italian supermarkets you have to weigh and price your own produce before heading to the cash register); you can join in a tug of war over the last ragged bunch of carrots while presenting an oration on Italy’s soaring food prices; you can engage in a non-stop game of “my big toe has been craftily placed in front of your big toe, whaddya gonna do about it?” as you struggle to hold your place in the check-out line; or, if you’re feeling weak and feeble, you can bow out of the physical competitions and simply wander the aisles, enjoying the artfully named products.
On days when the eCool crew are a bit under the weather and are not quite up to the rigors of body-checking and supermarket sparring, we find our entertainment in the processed meat section of the store, where we admire the vast array of “wurstel” or hot dogs on display. Not an original part of Italian cuisine (and certainly not featured in Marcella Hazan’s quitessential Italian cookbooks) the hot dog or “wurstel” has been enthusaistically embraced on the boot-shaped peninsula, and now appears most often on pizzas (ugh!) and in rice salads (almost as bad).
Ourselves, we don’t eat them. But we do enjoy them in other ways. We love the names they’ve been given, all of which seem to be plays on the Italo-German word “wurstel.” Two of our favorite brands appear in this post: Wusi (pronounced in a way that falls somewhere between “voozy” and “woozy”) and Wupi (pronounced between “voopy” and “whoopy”). We can stand there for hours, cracking jokes about “making Wupi” for dinner and feeling “Wusi” after eating a wurstel. Which wurst is worst?
